Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

103 the line-up as given in some contemporary sources, he appears to have played in the midfield in an unlikely 2-2-6 formation, 77 one of five Trinity men in the side. Cambridge - who had beaten Oxford in the previous four matches, including in 1880 when Oxford were FA Cup finalists - were beaten 3-0, on a fine afternoon but before a disappointing crowd. The report of the match in The Times names few individual players in the game (it doesn’t even identify all the goal scorers), so the fact that it does not refer to Alfred should not be regarded as bearing any significance. He was evidently a versatile footballer. In December 1884 he is reported as playing in the needle all-Radnorshire match between Presteigne and Knighton, representing the former alongside his brother Whitmore. He was listed as a forward in the match report, but at some point in the game he took over as the goalkeeper, but shortly thereafter he was injured and had to leave the pitch. The injury was evidently not as severe as at first thought: the press reported that ‘he was taken in a carriage to Dr Debenham’s surgery and is, we believe, only slightly injured, having sprained his leg in over-reaching to kick the ball’. Perhaps he’d forgotten that goalkeepers are allowed to use their hands? The scrapbooks’ last reference to Alfred as a footballer is a mention that he captained the Presteigne side in 1884 and 1885. After that, silence. No doubt the demands of the church caused him to re-think his sporting priorities once he had been ordained. His endeavours at golf get a brief mention in 1901, and again in 1921 and 1922. In the former year he played for Knighton against Presteigne, as did Whitmore; evidently neither felt a unique loyalty to one town rather than the other. In 1921 he felt it worth including in the scrapbook a reference to the fact that he finished fourth in the Hereford April Bogey competition, and in 1922 that he shared the title in the April medal competition at Holmer Golf Club (gross score 92, net 72). By now he was, remember, 62 years old. But aside from ponies and cricket, his major sporting interest was shooting. As his brief obituary in The Times put it (yes, he had an obituary in The Times a fortnight after his death, provided by ‘a correspondent’), ‘He was a good, and what his friends called a lucky, man with a gun, as wherever he happened to be placed the birds soared over, but not often past, his stand’. He is first recorded as shooting during his brief stay at Ashtead, but the bulk of his shooting took place every year on the Ross- shire estate of Ardross, owned by Alfred’s close friend Dyson Perrins (of the Worcestershire family behind Lea and Perrins sauces). 78 For many years he took his summer holiday between mid-August and mid-September, to coincide with the first month of the shooting season, and duly retained 77 Disappointingly, other near-contemporary sources show him as centre-half in a rather more conventional 2-3-5 line-up. 78 Charles William Dyson Perrins is summed up in his entry in Wikipedia as a ‘businessman, bibliophile and philanthropist’, and the description of his life that follows certainly bears out that last term. No doubt his generosity to many important establishments in Worcester, and to his old university at Oxford, found much favour with a high-minded clergyman such as Alfred Green-Price. The oldest of them all